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CHILDREN'S VOICES: SINGING AND LITERACY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2006

Kate van Orden
Kate van Orden
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

Around 1600, students in France learnt to read with printed primers. They began with the letters of the alphabet, learning them by playing with little wooden or cardboard tablets or picking them out of books, and then moved on to syllables, which were learnt from syllabaries printed in large letters and containing the Pater noster, Ave Maria, Credo, Confiteor and the Benedicite. When they began to spell out whole words, children moved on to another syllabary containing the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, Salve Regina, the Seven Penitential Psalms and the litanies of the Saints, all of them common prayers. Two pages from Jacques Cossard's Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633) can give us some idea of what these early modern primers looked like (see Figures 1–2). In the first lesson the text of the Pater noster is broken into syllables, whereas in the second lesson the students must discern the syllables of the Ave Maria themselves, a task aided by the small numbers Cossard has placed beneath the text to show how many letters should be read together as a syllable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Early Music History , Volume 25 , October 2006 , pp. 209 - 256
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the session on ‘Music and the Cultures of Print in the Renaissance’ at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Houston, Texas, November 2003, and in colloquia at All Souls College, Oxford, the University of California, Berkeley, and King's College, London. I would especially like to thank Jane Bernstein, Cristle Collins Judd, Anthony Newcomb and Jessie Ann Owens, who collaborated on the AMS session. For their reading of subsequent drafts, I am grateful to Bonnie Blackburn, Marie-Alexis Colin, Sean Curran, Frank Dobbins, Iain Fenlon, Joseph Kerman and Katelijne Schiltz. The research for this article was conducted during an unforgettable residency at the Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France, with the support of the Studium Fellowship, Philippe Vendrix, and the wonderful team of the Programme Ricercar.